Schwechater (Peter Kubelka, 1958)

MUBI site

Sometimes commercials are the best outlet for filmmakers, e.g., Len Lye, Viennale Trailers. The format: fund an artist and hopefully s/he'll create something that might in some way promote the company. This usually allows complete freedom yet a short length that most artists use to create abstract works, like Kubelka's film. Schwechater is one of the most hypnotic films of all-time with its strobing colors, extreme rapid cutting and the long intro that builds up to the breathtaking last 30 seconds (where no one blinks). While the company may not have been too happy with the film/commercial (it never aired commercially); I feel like it almost subconsciously makes you want to drink schwechater beer. A none drink myself yet I wouldn't mind having a schwechater one day.

Fascist tendencies (Manny Lage, 2011)

This film came out of watching a lot of Jennifer Sharpe's films (available here) in combination with Alexander Kluge's Brutality in Stone. Well, first I'd like to point out that as with most of my films, the ideas of what I wanted to create and what notions to interact with did not come until I had all the footage in front of me on my computer screen. So the ideas came from this footage combined with the recent viewing of the Sharpe's work and Brutality in Stone. Continuing the line of thought that Kluge started I wanted to explore the fascist potential of architecture yet for it to have the visual finesse and modernity of the Sharpe films. So I began creating the sequence with the tracks, where they change colors and multiply, and it ended up looking exactly as I had envisioned it: the tracks become hypnotic, even beautiful, but at the same time horrifying. The dried up drab landscape around was a perfect juxtaposition, the tracks had bled it dry. But during this process I had a massive discovery. Towards the tail end of the footage I encountered some images that almost completely shifted the film. The footage of the water. This water terrified me. This powerful, reckless force became more intimidating than the tracks. Water's coercive qualities quickly became apparent as well as the fascist tendencies of nature.